The 16 best images from NASA’s incredible Instagram feed

Before we go heaping too much praise on NASA here, let’s just remember: this is hardly fair. Yes, NASA has one of the all-time great Instagram accounts, but with about $18 billion in funding I’ll bet you could take some cool snaps, too. Grousing aside, these are some truly inspiring images. Some of them the agency’s more typical telescopic snapshots, but plenty also provide context or a glimpse of the human reality behind the science.

From last year’s breathtaking shot a the far side of Saturn to a touching photo of a physically weakened astronaut returning to Earth, NASA’s Instagram feed is one of the best places to get an idea of just what the human race is doing to reach that final frontier.

1. Astronaut Returns Home

Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy (oh, the woe of being an astronaut named Chris these days…) is seen here being carried to the medical tent near his touch-down point in a remote area of Kazakhstan. Cassidy, along with fellow space-farers Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, were returning after almost six months on the International Space Station. It’s hard to even imagine what Cassidy feels here, the familiar but somehow alien pull of a full Earth gravity, the smell of vegetation, the feel of open air. And don’t forget the weakness — Cassidy lost a significant portion of his muscle and bone mass while on the station. Even with advanced new space technologies, an astronaut’s whole job is to risk and sacrifice for the progress of mankind.

2. Canyon of Fire

The origin of this picture is a filament of magnetic solar material, which erupted in September of this year. The result? A 200,000-mile long slash of fire, and that’s on the surface of the sun, which is already on fire. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the surface is already a plasma, a super-heated form of matter where particles are reduced to their charged components and distributed in a magnetic field. The explosion captured here is one of the most spectacular ever captured from the Sun.

3. Comet Ison

Comet Ison was unusually popular, as comets go. That’s partly because it passed so unusually close to the Earth and was thus more visible than most. However, it’s also because Ison did a death-defying run near to the sun — and defied death no longer. A spectacular event, Ison let people see the final moments of one of the universe’s most enigmatic characters, the comet. This picture was taken just a few weeks before the comet’s explosive demise at the hands of the sun’s radiating heat, at a distance from Earth of just 80 million miles from Earth.

4. Floating Astronauts

Astro- and Cosmo-nauts Karen Nyberg, Fyodor Yurchikhin, and Luca Parmitano float weightless in formation aboard the Kibo laboratory in the International Space Station. Nyberg (front) keeps her feet tucked under a bar to keep from floating away. One can only imagine how frustrating this pic was to capture, though after so long in space they are probably more than familiar with the troubles of weightless navigation. If you were wondering, the ISS has supported life continuously, in space, for more than 13 years now.

5. Gamma Ray Burst

So, this isn’t a photograph, but an artist’s conception of an event that is rather abstract in its essence. Called by NASA a “watershed” cosmic blast, GRB 130427A (known affectionately as GRB 130427) obliterated the previous record for most violent gamma ray burst. In fact, this event went beyond what many physicists had believed was theoretically possible! NASA’s amazing Swift telescopes managed to capture the short-lived event thanks to a quick response time. Astronomers believe that the event was the collapse of a super-massive star into a black hole, though the significance of that insight won’t become apparent until astronomers have had time to comb through the data.

6. Lakes of natural gas

Titan is one of Saturn’s moons, made famous both by its size (and the memorable name that size produced) and by its odd physical features. Most recently, long-time speculation about buildups of otherworldly compounds were confirmed by NASA’s Cassini space probe. The satellite passed over Titan, taking readings and proving two things. One: Titan is the only world other than Earth to sustain liquid on its surface. And two: That liquid is in fact raw natural gas. Though flat and lacking in detail, this photo is amazing for what it represents: oceans of hydrocarbons.

7. Meteor Shower

The Geminid meteor shower prompted NASA to add this little gem to its Instagram feed. No, this isn’t a spectacular shot of the oncoming alien invasion, but rather a composite of many different images taken in black and white. What you see here is a false-color image showing meters from various showers over the period of 2009 to 2011. At its peak for 2013, the Geminid shower produced between 100 and 120 meteors per hour.

8. Morpheus lander test launch

A prototype lander is one of NASA’s oldest, and least used, tricks. It’s intrinsically interesting, a realization of untold numbers of childhood finger-paintings, but for decades NASA has relied on mostly the same old lander designs. That’s party because manned missions have been so far out for the agency — but this year it tested the Morpheus prototype at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility. The lander is autonomous and make all its own flight adjustments — and it even runs on green fuels like liquid oxygen and methane. Look for news about the Morpheus lander over the course of 2014.

9. Saturn Vortex

This vortex near Saturn’s south pole really drives home the point about gas giants — they’re made of gas. As a result, the surface of Saturn can undergo some truly astonishing changes as part of the planet’s otherworldly weather patterns. This vortex is essentially no different than a whirlpool in a river rapid — except it’s 2,000 kilometers across at the eye. That makes it easily 20 times larger than the biggest storm known on Earth, but to be fair our planet is made of hard materials like rock. For scale, realize that every pixel in this (full-size) image represents 5 kilometers of space. How’s that for a hurricane?

10. Saturn, the Earth, and our moon

Saturn is unquestionable the most photogenic planet in the solar system (with the exception of our own beauty queen planet, of course), but even by that body’s inflated standards, this image is spectacular. Taken by Cassini (the same probe that brought us Titan’s oceans of fuel), this shot manages to capture the Sun’s light filtering through the ringed planet’s famous geological halo. Most amazing, though, is that it also includes Earth and our moon in the shot. It’s difficult to see, but in the bottom left of the image Earth is visible — from the far side of a ringed gas giant.

11. Solar atmosphere

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spent much of 2013 trying to increase our understanding of the area directly surrounding the sun. The complex and, we now know, incredibly violent events taking place in the “interface region” between the surface and the corona are pictured here. The jets of plasma and haze of particles make something like a solar atmosphere, which has eddies and turbulent waves that have fascinated astronomers. This data just beginning to be analyzed, but for now we can at least gape at it with ignorant awe.

12. Solar Rainbow

This composite image shows our sun from an array of different perspectives — but not physical perspectives. Rather, this image knits together a single star as it appears in different places along the light spectrum. This isn’t just a visual project, but a demonstration of wide array of readings needed to fully understand the Sun — and we’re not nearly done that study. Different slices look at material of different temperatures. For instance, the green slice shows extreme UV light, mostly produced by atoms of over 6 million degrees Celsius. Many different instruments were needed to collect all this information, and more will be needed later. A 2014 update of this photo could easily add another slice or two.

13. Soyuz Launch

Russia isn’t the second-biggest name in space any more — that’s China — but it is still technically the world’s second space power. That’s not likely to last past 2014, as China races forward with a booming economy and seemingly unlimited national support, but Russia is still major player in the space industry. Here we see a Soyuz Rocket, one of Russia’s old standby technologies, readying to launch a new crew to the International Space Station this past November. The blurred effect comes from a long exposure, as service arms are raised into position.

14. Space Station On-Ramp

So, you’ve made it through NASA’s rigorous astronaut program, spent an entire career scratching and competing to be one of the world’s top five contenders to go into space. After literally decades on that path, the day finally arrives. You set three alarms, just to be sure, but on the fateful morning you wake to find that, after all this time, you’ve forgotten where to launch is taking place. Have no fear: the civil planners in charge of NASA’s Wallops Fight Facility have you covered. This tongue-in-cheek sign reminds us that, while it may be an indirect route with fewer crossings than we’d like, that in the modern age space is very much a place we can get to. Just don’t forget how to merge.

15. The best selfie ever

In space, there’s no such thing as a minor malfunction. The world took notice when a problem with a coolant pump confined the crew to just half of the ISS, and necessitated the launch of emergency crew to make repairs over the course of several unplanned space-walks. Here, we see the ISS reflected in the helmet visor of NASA’s Mike Hopkins, and in his helmet we can see fellow astronaut Rick Mastracchio, also hard at work. Though a coolant pump might seem like a minor issue for a space agency, such simple physical concerns are actually NASA’s most difficult adversaries; this is the third time the ISS has required repairs to its coolant system. The series of space-walks was successful and the ISS is returning to normal functioning for a very happy new year.

16. A Salute to the Veterans

OK, so this image isn’t from 2013. Still, this shot of Apollo 16 astronaut and Navy veteran John Young saluting from the surface of the moon makes the list through sheer sentimental charm. Posted on Veteran’s Day, NASA re-emitted Young’s salute to the world, more than 40 years later. His tip of the air-tight, radiation-shielded hat is directed at the American flag, but for Veteran’s Day it went out to every soldier who fought for peace on the planet down below.